X-Men #214 (February) With Malice Towards All.
Chris Claremont, Barry Windsor-Smith.
Dazzler flips out while playing keyboards for Lila Cheney at one of her sweaty rock concerts and starts doing the whole light show thing, thus dramatically upstaging the mockney Joan Jett. The X-Men are called in and find that Dazzler is possessed by Malice, as we saw in #210. Malice has no physical substance but hops from one body to another with her presence indicated by the possessed person sporting an art nouveau choker with a sinister looking face as the cameo. The usual fight ensues but with a twist as Malice inhabits different X-Men, and I feel I should probably make some wisecrack about Wolverine wearing the distinctive choker on page thirteen but I can't be arsed. Malice eventually flees, discreetly taking refuge in some random security guard and laying low, and Dazzler joins the X-Men because there's strength in numbers.
I've begun to notice the Claremont stream-of-consciousness creeping in over the last year or so, with dialogue or narrative reduced to a sort of freewheeling shorthand which I eventually began to find a little irritating back when I was buying these issues hot off the presses. It's something he's always done and it's often effective, but it gets repetitive when every scene showing plural adulation of a single individual always features at least one person thinking be still my heart; and then we have regular sentences broken up into seven or eight separate speech balloons strung down the side of the page like anal beads, presumably as a means of communicating pace; and those fucking annoying compound words - babyboy, boychick, boytoy and too many others. It aspires to rock 'n' roll but fails through its sheer incongruity. Back at school, my pal Grez had an ongoing beef with a younger kid we called Malcolm due to his resembling a chubby version of the Sex Pistols manager. Malcolm was younger and smaller, yet would effect a ludicrous hard man act when engaging with Grez, notably walking slowly towards my pal, effecting an evil grin while swinging his Adidas bag around himself at knee height as an improvised weapon. You'd better watch out, he warned us with affected glee, I'm a bagswinger! He seemed to be proposing bagswinger as a recognised gladiatorial type like the retiarius or murmillo. Anyway, I thought of Malcolm when Psylocke describes herself as a psycho-blaster on page nine.
This is still a generally great issue but, well, you know...
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